Mixes

Matthew J SaundersA mix of musical influences for The WIRE magazine.An hour long mix of creaky techno for Self-Titled magazine.

Reviews

"The Assembled Minds is the work of Matt Saunders, formerly one half of Magnétophone (4AD). It’s a brilliant distillation of lost nights out and the ghosts of dead raves. Like the sounds in your head the day after, when you’re vainly attempting to sleep, but the rhythm won’t stop. Brilliant misremembered rave flashbacks." —Jim Jupp, Ghost Box Records

"Differently great. Rippling reverb-misted pianos and a sleepwalk trance of drum machines and pumping bass – the vibe is much more Ultramarine’s “British Summertime” than ardkore. And there’s this sound that’s in most of the tracks: a high-pitched “peaky” timbre that is… ecstatically edging into dissonance, is the best I can do by way of describing it. It reminded me of what Trevor Horn once told me: his belief that great albums have the same sound running all the way through – his example was The Blue Nile’s Hats – so that every track is a chip off the same lustrous block, refracting slightly different." —Simon Reynolds, Retromania

"There’s nothing like a complete outsider to turn the conventions of a genre inside out, and Matthew J Saunders of 4AD’s motorik shoegaze pop explorers Magnétophone has done just that with his incursions into dubstep as Veil. Marshalling analogue synths and reverbs, Saunders brings whimsical Radiophonic melodies (on ‘Eat The World’) and an ever so slightly ramshackle, played-live sensibility, as if (Hot Chip were jamming with Jaki Liebezeit (on ‘Park Mist’) into play. Thankfully, though, there’s none of the indie tweeness that could come with these approaches. Instead, Saunders has taken on board dubstep’s sound system sense of physical scale, and in so doing made his components strange, threatening and fantastical — and, by forgetting DJ-friendly orthodoxy and adding musicianly touches, opening up rich new avenues of exploration of chord patterns and long form melodic routes through dubstep’s architecture." —Joe Muggs, The WIRE